1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of computer speech recognition, text-to-speech technology and telephony, and more particularly to a system and method for a run-time simulation environment for voice applications that simulates and automates user interaction.
2. Description of the Related Art
Functionally testing voice applications presents many difficulties. In the case of a VoiceXML (VXML) application, a VXML interpreter communicates with a platform that supplies the necessary speech technology needed to test the application in real-time. These speech technologies, such as an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine, or a text-to-speech (TTS) engine or converter, are generally very CPU intensive and expensive to build and install. In addition to the speech technologies, to test a application a tester must also provided the input to the application. This usually requires a tester to physically perform the interaction, in the form of actual speech or key tone input, which may be cumbersome and difficult to provide. Having a person perform the input can be time consuming and costly.
Furthermore, when testing a voice application, it can be difficult to mimic the true behavior of speech or audio input to the application, as well as any text-to-speech or pre-recorded audio output from the application. This is because voice applications are used in a run-time environment, and are therefore very “time-oriented.” A user is generally required to supply an input to the application within a certain amount of time or else a “speech timeout” may occur. In addition, it may be useful to ascertain the how long it may take for a typical user to navigate through a voice application so as to assess the behavior and efficacy of the application.
It would be desirable therefore to provide a testing environment that allows the simulation of user interaction as well as the simulation of the speech technology platform, such that a developer of voice applications will no longer be dependent on human testers and speech technology and hardware to test their applications. The testing environment would therefore be a “simulation environment” that would adequately replace the user and speech technologies. It would further be desirable to provide a simulation environment that simulated the actual execution time of a user interaction with the voice application, as if real input and output were occurring. A system and method is therefore needed to simulate that real-time execution.